Some parents' greatest wish is for their child to follow in their footsteps career-wise. You love your job, you want your kid to love theirs, so why not have your kid do what you do?

The parents who brought their young ones to the first-ever program for budding hackers from the ages of 8 to 16 feel the same way:

Hoff said basically most children in the United States are hackers in a way — "whether that's video games and understanding the relationship of what makes that computer work."

Hoff, whose wife is a scientist, said his children were "born digitally native" and he proudly describes his 7-year-old daughter as a "tinkerer, a hacker," and said his 10-year-old daughter "by DNA, I think, was born to hack."